Do you ever get the feeling you're being governed by a cartoon moose? If not, consider the federal government's plans for a biometric national ID card. In a filler segment in the old Rocky and Bullwinkle show, Bullwinkle the moose would invite his friend Rocky the flying squirrel to watch him pull a rabbit out of a hat. "Oh Bullwinkle, that trick never works," Rocky would say, and Bullwinkle would invariably and blithely reply "This time for sure" before equally invariably pulling out a lion, a tiger or a rhinoceros. Yet Bullwinkle was no more likely than Canada's federal government to wonder why his trick kept going wrong.

Suppose you were contemplating a potentially highly intrusive citizen registration project involving more people, more complex technology and more information per card than ever before. What's the first thing you'd do? Initiate a study group on its relation to the Federal Plan for Gender Equity? Hire 10 expensive consultants to ponder its bilingual aspects? Put out a press release on how it will enhance public health care?

Perhaps. But the right response would be to ask yourself whether you'd ever tried anything like it before. If you had, and your attempts had often gone wrong, you'd then try to figure out why, so you could avoid it happening again.

For instance, the gun registry. Forget for now whether effective gun control is a good thing, because there is little point in debating possible uses of a bunny when all you can actually get out of your hat is a lion. How can the government expect to register its citizens until it understands why it failed so dismally in registering a far smaller number of inanimate objects?

Perhaps by drawing on its extensive experience in registering citizens through the Social Insurance card. But it looks more like a tiger than a rabbit to me, folks. Again, forget for now any questions you may have about the project of giving us all numbers to facilitate efficient processing of the human units. Forget also that the government was less than honest in its initial assurances that the SIN would only ever be used for pensions and unemployment insurance (whose previous registration system had, believe it or not, collapsed into chaos), and would never, word of honour, appear on the income tax form.

Sure, we'd be suckers to believe it again. But at the moment my concern is with preventing the state, not its citizens, from acting like a cartoon moose. So remember the ruckus back in 2002 over the Auditor General's warning that there were some five million more SIN cards than Canadians over 20. And that back in 1998 the Auditor General had issued a similar warning, about a mere 3.8 million excess cards, prompting Human Resources Development Canada to leap into committee (five working groups and a request for more money) but not to stop accepting photocopies as proof of citizenship and identity. In 2001 HRDC found that it had often mailed over 100 SIN cards with different numbers to the same address within a year, in one case 225 of them. Might one ask why? Do they still?

Next, if you can stand it, consider recent revelations that there are no controls on the issuance of Certificate of Indian Status cards. OK, they keep them in a locked cabinet. But they mail out blank cards in bulk to First Nations who request them without any kind of national control system. It looks like a rhinoceros to me.

I don't doubt that we need better border controls. But in devising them we need to make sure we're debating the right issues. It's not even clear that biometrics is a good technological solution, because when it fails, it fails badly. If someone forges your instant teller card the bank can issue you a new one with a new PIN, but if someone forges your biometric ID you can't get a new eyeball. But the real issue here isn't the "fragility" of biometrics, or the potential misuses of an effective national ID card. It's fatuous confidence in a technological solution to a non-technological problem, the chronic tendency of government registries to be riddled with errors.

The federal government reaches into the hat and pulls out five million bad SIN cards, a $1-billion gun registry full of laughable errors, and a big stack of blank Indian Status cards that entitle the bearer to a range of expensive benefits. Normal, three-dimensional people would be chastened by such experience. Yet it remains blithely unaware, in fact and in rhetoric, that it is even capable of making a significant number of mistakes, let alone prone to it.

Instead, it says "Hey, citizens, watch me pull a reliable biometric ID card out of this hat." And when we reply "That trick never works" it stands there, looking stupid and self-satisfied, and says what it always says. "This time for sure."

Arggghh.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

The French government's decision to ban Muslim headscarves and other prominent religious symbols in schools is a logical extension of their general approach to government. But I don't mean that in a good way. Those whose admiration for France is driven primarily by its opposition to American foreign policy need to remember how much ideas matter. I'm not even convinced France's Greater Europa project is working out all that well. As I've said before, I think they're playing Athens to the wrong Rome. But it must be a particular disappointment that after all their hectoring of Americans for their provocative insensitivity to Islam, their hijab ban (unthinkable in the U.S.) led Canadian Islamic Congress national president Mohamed Elmasry to write that "France recently topped the list of Western human rights violators ..."

Why did they do it? Because French opposition to the "Anglo-Saxon model" does not simply consist of gratuitous if futile shots at George W. Bush. It runs much deeper. It offers a half-open society, with free political discussion about what people shall be required to do, not what they shall be allowed to do.

This fall in the Globe and Mail, Mr. Elmasry mocked calls for moderate voices among Canadian Muslims: "I propose that our government issue special 'moderate' cards for all Muslims in this country, whether citizens or not. Here's how it would work. An independent panel of experts is appointed, comprising one Canadian, two Americans, two Israelis and two representatives from the Muslim applicant's country of birth or family roots ... most Canadian intelligence reports against Muslims in this country come from the U.S., Israel, or selected Muslim countries."

Clever, but it's France that, at the end of 2002, established an official Muslim council. The interior minister called it "a chance to create an official Islam of France and a way to fight the Islam of cellars and garages ..."

It's no anomaly; similar bodies already existed for Catholics, Protestants and Jews. But France's record of social harmony is not impressive and my guess is French state-sanctioned Islam will not impress Muslims much, in France or elsewhere.

In truly open societies, by contrast, you are allowed great latitude including in choice of headgear. But, crucially, an open society is open at both ends. To be seen as moderate you have to say moderate things. Otherwise people will draw the obvious conclusion.

For instance, in a letter to the Citizen in October 2001, Ottawa Mosque imam Gamal Soleiman wrote "I am amazed at being called a 'racist' and 'propagandist' for saying that the dastardly deed of Sept. 11 could not have been committed by Arabs, as they lack such sophistication and efficiency. I did not know it was a crime to express my opinion." It might be if a non-Arab said it. It's certainly a scandal. And now the Citizen reports a hate-crimes complaint against a Muslim newspaper in B.C., over an article apparently denying the Holocaust, and blaming Jews for both world wars and the Great Depression.

An open society shouldn't ban hate speech. It's far better that evil be defeated in open debate. And unlike the French government, I'm sure it can be. It's how open societies work. And it's why I want to hear moderation from prominent Muslims, not silence punctuated by growling about the motives of those who ask about such silence. When my colleague David Warren makes provocative suggestions, other Christians openly disagree. Whereas in deploring the hijab ban, Mr. Elmasry said on a recent trip to Iran and Egypt he didn't meet one Muslim who didn't want more democracy, including Iran's president. But among the politicians, academics and cab drivers he spoke to, "the vast majority ... accused powerful Western countries ... of blatant hypocrisy" because, for instance, "most Iranians believe that their governmental system, although dissimilar to both the British and American models, is nevertheless democratic; yet the West did not even bother to study it as a valid alternate model."

Please, sir, don't talk like that. We did study it. Jimmy Carter's UN ambassador even called Ayatollah Khomeini "somewhat of a saint." But it turned out badly, like other non-western models on offer, from Cuba to Zimbabwe. It's not hypocrisy that makes us reject them, it's experience.

If you're looking for an alternative democratic model, consider France. Its government even officially certifies Muslim moderates. Unfortunately the same approach leads, logically, to a ban on hijabs in schools.

We don't do things that way here. And we are right not to.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

A cat just won the Montreal Gazette's professional football pool. And I'm not being catty when I call it a triumph for expertise. Not, perhaps, for the 11 broadcasters, sportswriters and former pro players the Gazette pitted against editor Lucinda Chodan's brown tabby Miss Kallie. They seem not to know one important fact: "the line" itself is a triumph of expert opinion and design, a classic case of the spontaneous order created by markets.

Thanks to a mystery novel by former NFL quarterback Fran Tarkenton, I know bookies are not gamblers. They are entrepreneurial middlemen who buy and sell risk without taking it. And as supermarkets do with apples, they try to acquire just enough risk from suppliers to satisfy demand. They don't care how likely Ol' Paint is to win a race or even whether he does. They only care that whatever happens, they collect enough from the gamblers who lost to pay off those who won, plus a small fee for themselves.

So they start with a rough guess as to how likely Ol' Paint and the others are to win, then adjust the odds up or down on new bets as the wagers pile up so that when the starter's gun fires they've given average odds of three-to-one on a horse if there's one dollar bet on him for every three dollars bet against him, four-to-one if there's $1 bet on him for every four dollars bet against, and so on. Then, no matter which horse wins, they transfer the money from the human losers to the human winners, minus their cut. In races with a complex payout based on 1st, 2nd and 3rd place, the math is more complicated but the principle is not.

Nor is it in the football "line." One wrinkle there is that instead of offering variable odds that Great Blue will defeat Big Red, bookies offer even money bets that Great Blue will win but by a variable margin, which they adjust up or down to keep the totals bet on each side equal. But again, the bookies aren't telling you what they think. They're calculating what everybody else thinks.

Wait. Doesn't that mean you can look for some systematic flaw in the bettors' assessment that lets you consistently beat the line? No. Hordes of fools gamble; what else could explain roulette? But lots of smart people bet too, and the odds already reflect their best guess as to what the dumb ones are doing wrong. The result is not perfect, nor given life's unpredictability could it be. Even when no horse is more likely to win than not, some horse must win. But the odds incorporate the best guesses of the smartest people as to the probable outcome based on the best information actually available. And you can't outsmart everyone.

Worse, any systematic strategy for doing so will go systematically wrong. That's why the cat had the best strategy, namely randomly sniffing bits of paper with team names written on them (or, if it wouldn't sniff, batting them once they'd been crumpled up). Her 101 wins, 82 losses and nine ties, or .552, was slightly lucky. But a certain amount of luck is itself probable; thus five humans and the cat beat the odds at the Gazette and six humans did not.

Why should you care? Well, if you don't already know the joke that horse sense is what keeps horses from betting on humans, it may save you a few dollars. Knowing it's also true of stock prices may save you a lot more (see Burton Malkiel's A Random Walk Down Wall Street). Of course you can occasionally get lucky, either in a random stock pick or by finding some relevant piece of information not yet generally known. How else would stock prices come to reflect all that can in principle be known? But you should still buy and hold broad-based mutual funds because, as a rule, by the time you've realized a certain razor shaves so close it obliges you to fend off half-clad females, so have lots of other guys.

Cats' eyes can even help us peer into the future. The Pentagon recently got in trouble over a scheme for futures contracts on real coups and assassinations. But while I would have bet on bad publicity if it got out that John Poindexter was letting people gamble on Yasser Arafat's head catching fire, the idea is sound. For instance, on global warming I'd trust the new weather futures on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange more than a David Suzuki prediction. And I'd say watch the Internet site where you can buy and sell contracts on such matters as the re-election of George Bush (lookin' good) or the capture of Osama bin Laden.

Finally, insurance premiums are a great way to judge real risk because they too combine real consequences for guessing well or badly with a widely cast net. For instance, when you buy life insurance you (or a loved one) are betting you'll die soon. Yet the middlemen who must weigh expert opinion precisely to make money won't ask if you own a gun.

Any cat can tell you why.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Long ago I read in one of those Chump's Guide to Philosophy books that a philosopher named M'Taggert devoted his career to the subject of time, and my reaction was that he certainly seemed to know a thing or two about wasting it. Eventually, as I aged, I realized he might have been on to something. I tried asking St. Augustine, to no avail. "What then is time?" he said. "If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know." He's not alone. We all know there's something odd about time, but the more we analyze it the less we understand.

Comedian George Carlin says "There's no present. There's only the immediate future and the recent past." OK. I take his point that the present is too ephemeral for us to grasp even briefly (how long is "now"?). But the past exists only in our memories and the future only in our plans. So time clearly does not exist and neither do we, a disquieting conviction that lasts only until some lummox treads on your foot and you are in pain NOW.

Comedian Red Green says "Time may be a great healer, but it's a lousy beautician." And we laugh. I could print a whole column of these jokes (no you couldn't - ed!) such as the Gilbert! magazine bumper sticker: "Warning: Dates in Calendar are closer than they appear." But what is this clear, colourless, odourless yet highly corrosive liquid that flows over all of us?

It has been said that time is God's way of keeping everything from happening at once. Without time there could be notes and even chords but no melodies, and who would wish to live in such a world even if such "life" were possible?

Time is connected with morality as well as mortality and not, I think, by coincidence. We are all familiar with the habitual Clintonian evasion of responsibility exhibited by, say, former Chrétien aide Jean Carle when a report on the APEC summit criticized him: "Life is too short for regrets. You have to move forward." Yes, but that's a law of physics, not of morality. As C.S. Lewis observes, "The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is." And yet Shakespeare has John of Gaunt say "What are six winters? They are quickly gone." And Bolingbroke replies "To men in joy; but grief makes one hour ten." Why? Why are some of us hurled forward by time and some of us dragged?

Because time's chief peculiarity is that while it is mathematically just another dimension, morally it is a one-way street. The moving finger writes and having written moves on, yes. But crucially the writing remains.

The plot can twist and turn while there's still ink in the pen. But time cannot absolve Bill Clinton of perjury without becoming a universal solvent. Paul Wells noted earlier this year that Jean Chrétien managed within one month to refuse to discuss the war in Iraq first because it hadn't happened yet, then because it was still happening, then because "it's over, so I don't want to spend a lot of time to debate it." Once you've swept aside past, present and future, mankind starts running out of tenses.

As G.K. Chesterton says, "The one thing a man cannot do is exactly what all modern artists and free lovers are always trying to do. He cannot cut his life up into separate sections ... The basis of all tragedy is that man lives a coherent and continuous life ... Man even in his lowest and darkest manifestation has always this characteristic of physical and psychological unity ... as he sows so shall he reap."

In The Lion King the adolescent Simba learns from Timon to let go of misery with a simple slogan of "No Worries" that consigns the past to the rubbish heap. It takes him part way, but then Rafiki clouts him on the head and when Simba asks "What was that for?" replies "It doesn't matter; it's in the past." So is every injury, but doing them is still wrong. That is why time is to Tolkien the Gift, as well as the Doom, of Men: Without wrong there is no right, no purpose and no moral agent. As a gravely ill deputy governor of the Bank of Canada once said, "Today is a gift. That's why they call it the present." And I hope it works out well for you this year.

I wish I could say more, and maybe if I'd read M'Taggert I could. But the truth is I've never found the time, just as I once got a company e-mail about a time management seminar but was too busy to go.

No matter. I am unafraid. Indeed, I face the new year with a new slogan: "I have not yet begun to procrastinate."

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

[display_podcast] Once upon a time there was a big meadow filled with many little creatures. Among these were a grasshopper and an ant. The ant was always working, piling up food in his little hole in the ground and strengthening his hole for the winter. But the grasshopper rejected the white male European mores of the ant, and sat in the sun all day enjoying himself and strumming his legs. Periodically the ant would lay down one of his burdens, wipe his sweaty brow, and say to the grasshopper: "You know, you really ought to give some thought to tomorrow. You should save for the future, you should work." The grasshopper would laugh, and call the ant insensitive.

This went on through the fall, though the days became shorter and the sun shone less. When the ant would stop and rest and warn the grasshopper about the implications of this trend, the grasshopper would lecture the ant on the Meadow Clause and tell him that this meadow was not like the awful one further south where no one cared about anyone else. "The creatures in our meadow are caring, charitable beings, and they look after one another." And he would stretch his limbs in the waning sunlight, and describe his plans for government tanning salons for the long winter months.

And then winter came. One morning the ant got up and pushed aside the leaf he had cut into a door, and found the meadow buried in a fine thick blanket of snow. He admired the beauty of the scene for a while, and then he went back inside for some breakfast.

While he was eating, a knock came at his door, and he answered it to find the grasshopper there, looking harried. "Brother ant," he said, "it has snowed during the night, and I can't find anything to eat."

"Yes, I know," said the ant. "I seem to recall having warned you about this. I have spent all summer filling my larder against this very development."

"You must share with me," said the grasshopper. "You must be charitable."

"But you would have food now if you had worked as I did during the summer months, instead of sunning yourself, strumming your legs, and lecturing me about compassion."

"You are a racist sexist homophobe," declared the grasshopper, and he mugged the ant and stole his food.

When the ant came to, he hobbled out in quest of the great wise beaver who ruled over the meadow and dispensed justice to its inhabitants according to the Meadow Charter. "Oh great one," said the ant, "I have worked all summer to fill my larder for the winter, and now the grasshopper has assaulted me and stolen my food. I ask you for justice."

"Well," said the beaver, "I hear and understand your point of view. It is certainly valid. But in this meadow all are entitled to food, clothing, shelter, medical care and a decent standard of living. Therefore you cannot begrudge the grasshopper the food. Surely you wouldn't want to live in the dreadful, uncaring meadow south of us."

"But great leader, he attacked me. Look at my leg I think it's broken."

"Well, that is certainly serious, and fortunately for you we have universal medical care, although I don't think we can schedule you for treatment until, say, March. In the meantime, it has come to my attention that the grasshopper has no place to live either. Every lifestyle is equally valid, of course, but homelessness is a scandal, so until we get the social housing built he will be living with you. Don't worry, though, he'll be using the bedroom, which you probably would find inconvenient with that broken leg. You can sleep in the kitchen."

So the ant called up his relatives in the southern meadow, and they came and helped him move what was left of his provender and household down to their neck of the woods.

And what became of the grasshopper? Well, eventually the hole he was living in became dilapidated, and he would sit on his porch and lecture passersby about the neglectful, antisocial attitude of his absentee landlord. I understand that the hole recently collapsed altogether, so I'm not sure what he is going to do.

Excuse me, I have to go now. Someone's knocking at my door.

The End?

[First published in Fraser Forum]